Will Wearable Technology Become Mainstream in Stores?
Wearable technology might—or might not—be widespread in stores in a few years. Here are the considerations to start to think about.
Oct 06, 2026 | 2 min read
As an employee inside one of Kwik Trip’s two Wisconsin distribution centers loads pallets, an automated voice inside a headset helps guide the work.
“It’ll direct them to an aisle and it’ll direct them to a slot,” said Joe Vike, senior director of distribution centers for La Crosse, Wisconsin-based Kwik Trip. The company has been using voice-automated headsets to guide warehouse work for more than two decades, Vike said.
This practical use case shows that wearables aren’t science fiction. But they also aren’t yet a standard part of most c-store employees day-to-day, although wearable technology such as Meta’s smart glasses grab headlines and broad attention.
The retail industry is still in the early stages of adopting wearable technology, said Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at EMARKETER who covers retail and e-commerce.
A future convenience store employee wearing smart glasses might one day just have to look at a shelf—and then the glasses do the work of telling the employee what needs to be restocked. Another employee preparing food might have an AI-powered headset walking them through the steps of preparing a new LTO.
What Wearable Tech Can Do for Retailers
Adoption could increase as the cost of wearable technology goes down, Canaves said, but other factors could delay a rollout to retailers.
“[Cost is] the key barrier for deployment more broadly in retail settings,” she said. “Retailers are grappling with the need to digitize and modernize and enable more AI technologies in their stores, but they have so many different competing priorities that they really have to figure out where the spending makes the most sense.”
QSR employees already use headsets, but the goal of more advanced technology is to connect to the wider business, Canaves said. That could mean planning inventory, improving customer service through coaching employees or answering customer questions when an employee doesn’t know the answer.
“This is especially valuable in retail or restaurant environments where you have a lot of staff turnover,” she said. “There is a constant need for training and refreshing the associates’ or employees’ knowledge.”
Read more in the October 2026 issue of NACS Magazine article: "Will They Wear It Well?"
